Dear Editor,
Thank you for publishing the helpful article, ‘Caring for God’s earth’ by Simon Marsh (en, January 2021). He referred to the injustice of our consumption of more than our fair share of the world’s resources, but we should also remember the terrible damage being done to the lives of the poor by climate change, right now, as a result of our combustion of fossil fuels. As Greta Thunberg put it, at the UN in September 2019: ‘People are suffering, people are dying. how dare you?’
And she is right – at the same time the International Red Cross reported that 2 million people each week need emergency assistance because of the climate crisis. ‘This is intolerable!’, said Francesco Rocca, its President. Similarly, Christiana Figueres, commenting on the massive, inter-agency report in the leading medical journal, The Lancet, in October 2017, concluded that, ‘Hundreds of millions of people are already suffering health impacts as a result of climate change’.
